Research into human IQ — long one of the most controversial areas of science — has produced a new set of suitably awkward results.

Men’s average IQ is four points above women’s because they typically have bigger brains.

Scientists used the latest scanning techniques to measure the brain volumes of 896 people, who were also subjected to a battery of intelligence tests.

“We found that the average IQ of men was about four points above that of women,” said Professor Dimitri van der Linden, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

“So if men had an average score of 100, women would score 96.” …

They found that men had an average brain volume of 1.2 litres compared with 1 litre for women. The surface area of men’s cerebral cortex was 1850 sq cm against 1630 sq cm for women. A key finding was that in both men and women, people with bigger brains had slightly higher IQ scores.

Feminists respond by pointing out that men have bigger bodies because their brains are larger — no, men and women’s bodies have the same number of bits to control, and overweight or large people don’t have larger brains as a result of their general size.

The article doesn’t mention the more critical factor, that the standard deviation of the male population is larger than that of the female for nearly everything, including IQ. So most of the very stupid and very smart people are male. In particular, only 37% of humans with IQs over 120 (the bottom of managerial level) are female.